


dead fruit of a dead kingdom

by winterbones



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hades/Persephone AU, everything is hades/persephone and nothing hurts, rumpelstiltskin is a life ruiner he ruins people's lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterbones/pseuds/winterbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They may tell the story however they like. Stories have always amused me, but the truth far less."</p><p>for sleeping hook week, day 7: hades/persephone au</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They will tell you that it was love, a love that drove him mad. That he gazed upon her by chance and struck by the beauty of her in the sunlight, the sort of beauty that will burn you away if you look to closely, a beauty whose intricacies are not meant to be understood—she was labyrinthine without meaning it, a hedgemaze that wound endlessly around her heart; her simplicity was her riddle, and she wore a crown of daises before she wore a crown of gems. They will tell he lost himself in her, in the burn of her, that all his rational thoughts were ashes and the only way to piece himself back together was to steal her light, drag her down to his murky kingdom of corpses. They will tell you this story.

They will tell you wrong.

At first, she is nothing more than a pawn, a chess piece to be sacrificed for a greater play. He stole her, came upon her astride a great black beast while she sang a summer hymn in the summer sun, her fingers tangled in the fleshy veins of a weeping willow tree, because stealing her would be a blow. The immaculate king of immortals upon his gilded throne of white marble and sunshine would take it as an insult, that one of his flowers could be plucked from beneath his nose. The king of the dead thought only to take this daughter of the spring, this dawn child, and bury her so far beneath the earth she wilted and waned like the death of the moon.

They will not tell you, either, how the naked feet of the spring goddess sunk into the ground, how she knew the sensation of mud between her toes, slopping and thick. They will not tell you that the weight of womanhood already bore her downward. She had never been meant for men, anyway, or gods in their lofty castles. Something that burned as bright, light the first burst of dawn over the horizon, could only ever accept the darkness as her match.

 

 

 

 

 

She knew the first sighs of womanhood long before she knew the clasp of cold darkness. Her bones took to trembling in the early spring beneath the shade of a weeping willow tree. She let a shepherd kiss her, mouth whisper-soft and tender, and inhaled the musky, earthy scent of him—he smelt like wet earth and something wonderfully alive, and she brushed aside the dusky fall of his hair with a loving hand.

He was easy to love, and easy to forget. The way the spring forgets the summer in the burn of its glory. She left him in a meadow with a drooping tree, and trailed off her mother, harvest goddess, and did not think no him again until long after his children’s children had been put in their graves.

The nymphs that were her caretakers wove hyacinths in her hair, and sang to her summer songs and she fell on the cushion of grass with sun as her pillow. Her mother watched over her, sewing grain and making wheat grow, and kissed her daughter’s dewy brow. Endless summers and endless springs she had safeguarded her daughter, and in her safekeeping she grew lax and turned her eyes to other things—she had kept herself from the inner workings of the heavens that when she finally opened her ears to them she was caught up in their sounds.

The goddess of the harvest never saw the dark shadow that feel over her daughter.

 

 

 

 

 

A lie within the truth: when the Lord of Death came upon her, they say she screamed and wailed, kicked as she was dragged astride his great black beast, that her crown of daisies was trampled and left a crumpled trail in the wake of her kidnapping for the nymphs to collect and weep over.

But, clasped in his cold arms, pressed to his dark leathers, she did not scream. The world opened a chasm and swallowed them both, and her pale fingers clasped into the thick leather covering his flesh.

And she did not scream.

 

 

 

 

 

The kingdom of the dead was a vast, empty maze of rooms and dark marble corridors, stalagmite pillars that held up the crust of the world. A chilled, bitter wind blew from the gray-swirling River Styx that circled that keep.

No kingdom rivaled the land of dead in residence.

The dread lord tossed his captured prize in the nearest empty room, an extravagant, massive room of black marble and ivory statues, of gilded mirrors and a bed of deep, soft down, the softest anyone will know.

But the daughter of the spring only saw walls. She had known only open, wide blue skies and soft, green grass—the absence of color, the absence of space, made her throat flutter and close in panic.

“You will stay here,” intoned the dread lord, his voice carrying the sound of sword clangs and death rattles, of a hundred different wars, and a hundred different kinds of suffering.

She shuddered and moved away from him, frozen with terror.

“The keep and the kingdom are yours to explore,” he added, as if in second-thought.

“I will—”

“You have no chance of escaping. No kingdom is as fortified as the kingdom of the dead, and only a very few of its entrances and exits. You could wonder endlessly and never know the sun.”

A bolt of terror raced through her and made her tremble like a fawn caught a hunter’s scent, but the dread lord made no mention of it.

“You cannot keep me here!” Like a burst of flame, the daughter of the spring snapped forward. “I’m not prisoner! I’m a goddess of the spring, and my mother is of the Twelve—keeper of harvest—”

“You will stay until such a time I release you.” His voice was an axe coming down, cutting through her words—leaving her only to bristle. “I suggest you find some way to reconcile yourself.”

He left her, and heard the shatter of a mirror in the wake of his exit—a golden hairbrush against the glass?

Later, he realized he did not even know her name.

 

 

 

 

 

In the heart of the kingdom of the dead, hidden away in the center of the keep like a heart, there was a garden, but like all things in the kingdom of the dead, nothing living could grow, even there.

The daughter of the spring found her wandered her way to the garden, and stood in the mocking imitation of life—glistening flowers and carved hedges, smooth white pillars copying the temples far above her head.

For a moment, the daughter of spring was crippled with longing and raced forward to drag her fingertips across the petal of tulip, and felt only smooth, unreal flesh—like glass.

An imitation of the real thing, she thought. The dread lord is king of the dead, and even Thanatos bowed his snow-capped head in reverence of him, and yet this was a garden that festered with longing; something _did_ grow here, but it was only a deep, wide yearning. She sensed it in the fake-grass that did not tickle her bear toes, in the glass petals that she could not weave into her sun-kissed hair.

Is he lonely, she wondered.

 

 

 

 

 

The daughter of the spring was a like a splotch of bright heat in his icy kingdom, and the dread lord is drawn to her the way all dead things are drawn to the living, the way the souls of the River Styx shoved selfishly against their watery cage.

He found her in a garden he had not intended to create, one that had sprung to life without his knowledge. The glass flowers had been there, fully formed, and he had tried time and time again to yank them out, end their mockery of him, and had only bloodied his hands.

She snapped her hand back from the glass petal when she heard his footfalls, and cast a sheepishly glance over her shoulder, as if half-expecting to be scolded.

“My lord.” Her voice was a frosty blast of scathing, and one that shocked him. It sounds unnatural on her, who had only ever spoken in the dulcet tones of spring. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Nothing at all,” he muttered, hating that he squirmed beneath her accusing gaze. She could never understand, this long-planned revenge, that the only thing that had satisfied him through the long, long years of his existence was the thought of making the king of the heavens pay. How could she, the daughter of the spring, a child of eternal sun, understand the isolation, the chill in his bones?

He would have walked away, and left her there, but stopped short—she had hyacinth woven into the tumbled fall of her earthy hair, and they had begun to curl inward and wither.

“What’s your name?” he demanded, and she seemed stunned that he would care to ask—or perhaps it was his voice, hoarse and rasping from disuse. The king of the dead did not often have reason to speak to the living, or at all.

“Aurora,” she said. “Others have called me Persephone—but my name is Aurora.”

“And Hades is not mine—that is the kingdom I rule. Once, I was called Killian.”

She hadn’t asked, and hadn’t look particularly interested to know, but the surprise was that he had wanted to tell her.

 

 

 

 

 

A truth within the lie: when he saw her, the daughter of the spring, with the king of the heavens in her eyes, he saw only a pawn, a chess piece to nudge into place.

But when he clasped her in his arms, and felt her tremble but did not hear her scream, something stirred in his cold, dead heart.

 

 

 

 

Cerberus was the guardian of the underworld, for no surprise was it that many souls sought to escape their final resting place. His massive jaws snapped those wayward souls and tore them to pieces, cold and ruthless as his master.

But when Aurora approached the massive beast, it trembled and whimpered, maw nuzzled the ground, scrimping at her feet.

He was born of darkness, and in darkness, and Aurora’s flesh was infused with sunshine and life—she seared him the way a brand would.

But she reached out and laid a hand on his back. The beast trembled, and laid at her feet like an offering.

Later, in the garden, the daughter of the spring noticed a sapling growing there, stubbornly green, and she dragged her palm over it and breathed on it to give it life—praying that it would grow.

 

 

 

 

 

The king of the underworld sat on a throne of thorns, barbed and twisted, the thick, black roots twined together. It frightened Aurora, and she stayed far away. She found it a wonder that the mangled thing had not killed its king yet.

“I made it, upon my first descent into the depths of my kingdom, yanked from the gnarled roots of the dead trees that grow in Tartarus. The thorn there, that spikes from the center? It pierced my father Kronos’s heart. When a god dies, his body turns to ashes so quickly. The only thing that remained of him was the thorn. I decided it would be an appropriate centerpiece for my throne.”

She turned wide, bluebell eyes to him, red lips parted.

“Why?” she demanded, the macabre words racing a shudder through her—she had only ever known summer and spring and the ghost of warmth on her cheeks. She could not comprehend the depths of winter, the intricacies of his deadened heart.

His thumb rose, as if on its own accord, and stroked over the plump curve of flesh on her lips. “So I would not forget.”

Later, she realized it was the first time he had touched since the day he dragged her down into the cool darkness of his kingdom.

 

 

 

 

 

She made a home here, the dread lord thought—see how Cerberus scampers at her feet, fierce watchdog of the Underworld now turned lovesick pup. He watched her now, from the private corner of his balcony, overlooking the garden. She crouched beside some seedling, vainly clinging to life, running her moonlight fingers over it. Killian almost snorted. She would learn soon enough, nothing grew in the land of the dead.

But he noticed—the way her hair shimmered down her back, thick tumbles of sun-kissed bronze. The way the gauze of her sleeves danced down her slender arms—covered now in the thick fall of his fur coat; there was a constant chill in his unhappy kingdom, and he’d noticed her shivering. It gave his stomach a jump to see her encased in his own clothes.

Killian thought he might have heard a rumble from the ground of above—but the land of the living has little recourse on the dead, and he was far more enraptured with the way her voice warbled out, tentative at first, then growing stronger with each note, an aria of life that seemed to rattle the very bones of his kingdom.

It rattled his bones, to be sure.

 

 

 

 

 

A mother’s grief was as cold as winter, and crueler by far than death.

 

 

 

 

 

The sapling grew a petal, an unfurling color of deep red—and something struck in Aurora’s heart. Something that turned it over. She had thought her dread lord kidnapper cruel, and then she had thought him lonely. She thought him lonely still, but with less pity and more tenderness. This time, it was not her fingers that she pressed to the sapling, but her lips.

Beneath her palms, the roots dug in deep and sprung upward, and on his throne of thorns, the lord of the dead felt the beginnings of a fever against his brow.

 

 

 

 

 

When she came to him, hair hanging loosely down the cloak he had dropped unceremoniously onto her shoulders—a cloak she had begun to sleep with, wrapped up in his unearthly scent—it was not a surrender.

Hades, the name of the dead kingdom that had superimposed over his own, was a kingdom of silence, and forever cast in half-shadows. When Aurora had first arrived, the only light that had filled it was the eerie grey glow of the River Styx below the elevated keep. The dread lord had taken to lighting candles, though the flames would offer her no warmth were she to press her fingers to them.

He sat beside the window of his outer bedchambers, mulled wine clasped in his hand. He stared downward, into the grisly river that carried his people in an eternal churn, and Aurora wondered if there wasn’t some kind of penance in his gaze.

Her footsteps were as soft as the first coming of spring, for spring must be devious at times to steal over winter, for winter was greedy and hard and would not relinquish its hold to tender spring without some duplicitous cunning.

It wasn’t until her earthy scent tangled in his noise did he turn, and she had the pleasure of seeing his face caught in surprise—one of the few unguarded emotions he had allowed her to see.

“Aurora—”

But she pressed her mouth to him, spring-kissed fingers against his wintery cheeks, to silence his words. They had little bearing here. It was not forgiveness, her lips to his, but it was an undeniable hunger. When he grabbed at her, fingers spanning the small width of her waist and dragging her into his lap, it wasn’t the same as the day he had stolen her from the only life she had known—with cruel indifference. No. It was hungry and desperate, and his mouth was warm against her own, and she stroked her fingers through his hair as her womanhood came upon fully. She did not know hunger now, she knew ravenous emptiness—and instinctively knew he would fill her.

And she was not afraid, as he stood from his seat and carried her to his bed, sunk her into cool sheets of black silk, and sunk into her—even through the pain Aurora felt the cords of pleasure, and she scored them down his back, an even rise to his desperate fall.

When she laid beneath him unfinished, he took it to heart and showed her how clever a king can be with his fingers, with his mouth, and Aurora knew the first burst of summer in her breast, her lashes fluttering wildly against her cheeks, his heart hammering against her chest. And later, when he filled her again—and again, and again, an endless night she would have chosen to never part from—she learned completion that way, the pleasure of coming undone with him clasped so tightly between her legs, with his surprisingly feverish mouth upon her breast.

 

 

 

 

Later, as Aurora dozed against his side, he caught her hand and spread out her fingers, thumbing the center joint on her ring finger.

“I shall make you my queen,” he said, with finality.

She stiffened and lifted her gaze. She could not make out his face in the darkness of his room, but knew he could see her—the pursed lips, and wary eyes. “You stole me for revenge, you said once,” she murmured. “I deserve to know why.”

For a moment, Aurora thought he would deny her, and she felt ice in her heart as the silence stretched.

But then, he began to speak.


	2. Chapter 2

He loved a woman once, mortal and lovely, dark-haired and dark-eyed. The first woman he had felt a stirring for since he and his brother had stolen the heavens from their Titan-father.

But the king of the heavens had desired her too, and seduced her with his brother’s form and hid her from his brother’s gaze, playing a husband to her wife, she had born him a son and he had laughed at her misfortune when he revealed himself—the grief on her face and the glee on the king of the god’s when he whispered the truth to her; Hades, who was once his brother Killian, was lord of the dead and could never give life to anything, not even a babe in a woman’s womb. The woman had rushed to the lord of Hades, and begged him to take her away, to steal her away, even if it was down into the dark depths of his kingdom—would that not be better?

He would have taken her too, no matter how the darkness of his kingdom might have drowned out her light, but he tarried too long in his indecision, and she thought he would cast her aside—and hanged herself to save her from the sorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

“He took her soul to the Elysian Fields, a place I cannot enter. My brother will not even give me that.” Still hidden from in the shroud of darkness, Aurora felt his gaze pinning her all the same. “I cannot forgive him, and I will not—I will have vengeance for the woman’s soul I once loved.”

“Why?” Aurora breathed, her hot breath on his chest making his skin shiver. “Why does he hate you so?” She had only ever known love—her mother’s and the nymphs who had cared for her, her sweet shepherd she had not given a thought to since coming here.

“It was I who struck the thorn into my father’s heart,” her dread lord said. “My brother was too much of a coward to do it, in the end—and it was I who gave him the crown, and made him king. He will never forget that it could I have been me in the heavens, and he below.”

Her fingers fisted onto the smooth, cool plans of his chest. She had never met the king of the heavens, the man who was whispered to be her father. Her mother had always kept her far and away, and now she thought she might know why.

“I called him brother once,” Killian mused. “And loved him as one, but he never loved me. Rumpelstiltskin has no love in his heart, he only has room for power."

 

 

 

 

 

The lord of the dead married the daughter of spring in the dead garden, at Aurora’s instance, and between them was the blooming sapling. There were few witnesses—only a bedraggled Hecate, a bored Eris, and grim-faced Thanatos whom Aurora had never heard spoke a word.

“He doesn’t,” Killian explained to her at the wedding feast, catching her gaze lingering on the gaunt, skeleton of a man, “Speak. Thanatos is death itself, and death is the keeper of all secrets. Were he to speak, he would never be able to stop and all the secrets of the world would spill out of him. The king’s too, and so my brother had his mouth sown shut. The sight of it disgusted my brother’s wife so much that he was banished to my kingdom to remain. Hecate gave him a glamor in a rare kindness, so he might at least remember a better day.”

Aurora trembled, and Killian pressed his mouth to the gentle slope of her shoulder. “Do not think of such sad things,” he urged her, and when the furrow of her brow persisted, he plucked her from her seat and set her in his lap, feeding her sweatmeats and wine.

“There is sadness in everything,” he explained to her, and pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Even in life. Death, at least, will not surprise you with his sorrow.”

Perhaps he was right, and Killian pressed hotter, hastier kisses to her mouth until Aurora forgot. Thanatos did not begrudge her. He did not begrudge anyone their joy, for he too often stole it away. But he would never be able to tell his queen so.

 

 

 

 

 

It happened in the garden. Aurora’s husband had been called down to the River Styx and Aurora was left to wander the garden. In the time since their marriage, the sapling had sprung up into a tree—thick, dark oak and bright green leafs, with ripe red fruit hanging heavy from the branches.

There was a secret smile on Aurora’s face—a woman’s smile; life could grow, even here, in this dead kingdom. Her fingers reached out to pluck one tempting fruit from her grasp.

A gust of wind ruffled the light hem of her gown and she spun. The fresh, boyish face of Hermes flashed in a blur before her eyes as she was gathered up against him, wiry arms around her waist. This was not the same as when her husband had taken—and Aurora felt terror. She screamed, she kicked, but there was no one to aid her and the fleet-footed god bore her upward into the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

All that was left of his wife was the stubborn hyacinths woven once into her hair that had never withered. She had worn them as a chain around her neck, and it had been broken in the struggle, strewn about the garden floor, one pierced upon the mockery glass of a rose thorn.

Thanatos stood before him, reed-thin and face grief-stricken. He had seen the arrival of Hermes, and had rushed to the queen’s aid. Unable to call out for help, and too far away to aid the woman himself, all that had been left for him to do was collect the discarded flowers and await the arrival of his king.

“She is gone,” Killian said, his voice a thunderclap against the unnerving hush of Thanatos. “ _Taken_.”

Thanatos nodded.

The king of the dead strode away, and in the garden the only living tree began to wither—the red fruit concaved inward and rotted, began to drop heavy to the ground, the browning leafs burying the remains as they fell from the gnarling branches.

 

 

 

 

 

Aurora was locked away in a tower of thorns, and she pulled at them until her palms were bloody. Hermes had spoken not a word to her, not even as he had slammed the door to her prison behind her. She railed at him, and railed at the king of the gods—not her king, she shouted, never her king and she demanded to be returned to her husband, to her lord.

She wept bitter tears between bouts of rage, but the grief gave her strength, to continue to pull despite the pain and mangled skin of her hands.

The moment her mother found her tower, Aurora knew—she smelled the burn of life on her—and she did not know if her renewed tears were for joy or sorrow.

“Oh, my love.” Her mother destroyed the door in her haste to reach her daughter, turning the thorns into a blaze and then ashes around them. Life sprung up in thick, green patches beneath Aurora’s feet as her mother encased her in the circle of her arms. “Oh, I am so sorry. I searched for you. I made winter eternal on the earth until you were returned me—the king promised to return you to me, and said he give you back to me if I allowed the harvests to survive. I did, but he did not keep his promise—he did not!”

Warm, familiar fingers stroked her hair, but Aurora did not take pleasure in her mother’s embrace the way she once had—a girl’s simple pleasure, and the only love her heart had room for. Even as something inside her cried out in joy at being with her mother again, something else wept for another’s hands, another’s fingers, another’s embrace.

Aurora drew back, and stared into her mother’s face—lined with wrinkles that had once not been there, grief in her eyes that she had once never known, but perhaps she had always looked so; a girl would not notice the visage of a woman, and subtle tells of a woman’s life.

“We have much to discuss,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

This was the first time the king of the dead had ascended to Olympus since he had taken up his mantle of kinghood. The king of the gods sat on his gilded throne of white marble, his wife beside him, and smiled with feline contentment at the arrival of his brother. The gods gathered around them in a crush, a half-circle of excitement as their king extended spindly fingers and beckoned his brother forward.

“A rare pleasure, my brother,” spoke the king, eyes alight with a wicked gleam—once Killian had thought it charming, had not paid so much mind to the sharp glints at the corner of it. Now he knew the viper for what it was. “To what do I owe the honor?”

Killian took a stride close to the throne, closer than anyone else would have dared, and carried in the thud of his footfalls every death ever descended into his realm. Darkness crept upward from the mountain’s floor, stole like a spider’s web across the glazed tile, and the crowd of gods began to tremble, and knew fear.

“I have come for my wife.”

 

 

 

 

 

“You cannot,” her mother breathed in horror. “You cannot.”

Aurora clasped her mother’s face between her hands—marveling how once this woman had comforted her, and now she would comfort this woman. “But I do. Feel my heart, mother—you once knew it better than any. Know the truth. I love him. I love him more than the sun, and the spring and the summer, more trees and lakes and forests, more than myself and everything I am.”

Her mother fell to her knees, and wept into Aurora’s stomach, wept with the tears that every mother would recognize—the tears when they knew their daughter was no longer theirs alone.

“Rumpelstiltskin will never allow you to return,” her mother said and Aurora felt her heart burn with love for this woman, who had given her birth and given her all the love girlhood needs—this woman who would let her go. “He will steal you over and over again from your husband’s realm, until he finds a way part you eternally. His hate is boundless, as is his fear, and he fears what he cannot control.”

“Then we must find a way to remove that power form him.”

Her mother thought, standing and moving to the window. “Nothing that lives can grow in the kingdom of the dead, but to eat the food of Hades is to remain its living prisoner, bound to it… a riddle no one cared to puzzle out.”

Yes, Aurora thought. The food she had eaten with her husband had been stolen from the world above, eaten quickly lest it decay. The garden she had loved to walk had been made of glass, and nothing living. Nothing, except the fledgling tree.

“Perhaps you two might discover the answer together. There are few, however, who would risk the king’s wrath by bringing you back but—” The goddess of the harvest spun, the sunlight flittered through her hair in a fine film of gold dust. “I may know of one, one person whose wrath not even the king of the gods would are tempt.”

 

 

 

 

 

“Kneel,” the king urged gleefully, hands clasping together. “Kneel, and beg me, throw your pride to my feet—perhaps I will return your wife to you.”

Killian did, dropping heavily to his knees, head bowed like he prostrated before an altar. “Lord of the gods,” he intoned, with the solemnity of a funeral march, “king of mine, return to me my wife, who was stolen from me.”

He felt the chains at his ankles, and at his wrists, felt the binding of them, magically forged in the fires of Hephaestus’s smithy, no doubt, in a desperate bid to please his mother. He felt them, and heard them lock to the marble floor, but did not move, only lifted his gaze to the king.

“You, who held that pride of yours in such esteem! That arrogant, selfish pride! I might have loved you,” cackled the king, “if not for it—you would toss your prized arrogance, your unquenched thirst for revenge, at my feet as if it weighed less to you than a minor goddess who would wilt like a flower in your kingdom?”

“She will not wilt. She is stronger by far than me—and you.”

“You would give everything for her, then. Why?”

“If you could, wouldn’t you? If you could steal her, if only for a day, how could you not? She has wrecked me in ways a conquering general would envy. I need to know the weight of her bones the way a dying man needs to know his next breath. If I can, I’ll take her for myself, own her, possess her, carve out a spot for her inside my ribs, let her remain there for as long as she pleases, the strongest bones in my spine. Wouldn’t you? Couldn’t you?” The king of the dead had spoken too much, and turned his head away in disgust. “You could never understand, and once I couldn’t have either, but I’ve learned there are greater things than pride, and hate. So I ask for my wife to be returned to me, my king, my lord and my liege.”

Who laughed, his twisted so cruelly, that even his wife looked ill at ease. “Do you think truly think I told you the truth? That I would be moved by your sentimental words? You, who stole the daughter of the spring—my own daughter—in a bid to revenge yourself on me. Did you think I would give you something you desire above all things?”

“No,” Killian admitted. “But my wife has taught me to hope despite that.”

 

 

 

 

 

Eros flew her down into the depths of Hades on golden wing, holding her tightly in his strong arms as they broken through earth and barrier.

“The garden,” she screamed at him over the rush off air. “You must take me to the garden!”

He did, and though they moved so fast they were but a blur of color, he landed as soft as a sigh in the garden. Aurora fled his embrace immediately, tripping her haste to reach the tree. Her fingers touched its withering husk, and grief knifed through her heart like ice.

“It’s dying. It’s dying.” She knew without looking for him that her husband was gone. She would have felt him, in his kingdom, bound to him as she was. There was only a heavy absence in her heart.

Her foot shifted, and brushed against a half-rotted fruit. She crouched down to grab it, thumb pushing passed its decayed flesh, pulpy juice exploding against her fingers as she pried it open. The inside was rotted as well but—

Seeds, clinging to life.

“There’s only six,” she bemoaned, pulling them from the husk of the fruit,

“Six seeds, six months with your husband,” Eros said with an indifferent shrug.

Aurora nodded, and swallowed them greedily, crunching with such fervor that the juice dribbled down her chin like blood. Her fingers were sticky with the mess, and her stomach twisted in pain as the fruit of the dead settled heavy inside her but Aurora stood on trembling legs and rushed to the throne room, Eros at her heels.

She climbed on top the throne of thorns she had always feared, had even refused to touch even after she had been married and proclaimed queen of the dead. The thick thorn at the top, the crowning glory of the monstrous throne, snapped easily against her tug—as if it had been waiting for her all along.

“Will you take me to Olympus?” she demanded of Eros, clutching the thorn to her breast. “I mean to collect my husband.”

The winged god cocked his head in consideration. “I shall.”

“Thank you,” breathed the queen.

“Do not mistake it for kindness,” Eros said, the smile the curved his impossibly beautiful mouth dangerous than any sword, or any sickness. “Love must be ever cunning—and it may be one day that I need you to repay this debt.”

 

 

 

 

 

Aurora found the gods jeering at her husband, dark-head bowed and powerful shoulders hunched in a gesture of submissions that she found suited poorly for him. He was forced to kneel before the king’s throne and the sight forced her into action, and plowed through crowd. She was a lithe, little thing and yet they bowed over as she moved passed them, moved so quickly that no one realized what was happening—even Killian only managed a belated shout of protest as she threw herself at the king of the gods.

Rumpelstiltskin had made to lift himself up from his gilded throne, fingers spread over the arms, but stilled when he felt the press of the thorn’s point to his heart.

“Release my husband,” Aurora said slowly, words for her and her father only. “Or I shall drive this into your heart and give him your place.”

“You would bear my wrath?”

“You will let him go, and you will seek no vengeance against us. I have swallowed the fruit of the dead, and my years I give to him, and you know as well as I that if he is not returned to his kingdom the dead will spill onto the land of the living, and your faithful worshippers shall turn their gaze from you.”

The king’s spindly fingers curled with bruising force into Aurora’s wrist, and the chains binding Killian rattled as he struggled to move forward.

“Take him, then,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “But I will never see his face in my kingdom again. Master your husband, and guard him well, daughter.”

“Not your daughter. _Never _your daughter.”__

__She withdrew, thorn still clutched in white-knuckled fingers, as the king lifted his and snapped them. The chains binding the dread lord fell away and he leapt to his feet. His wife was upon him within a heartbeat, aborting his dangerous step forward._ _

__“No. That is _enough_ ,” she hissed at him, fingers curled into the leather of his tunic. “You will take me _home_ , husband.”_ _

__And for the first time, the king of the dead turned away from revenge._ _

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__“There were only six seeds left when I managed to come back here,” Aurora explained as she and Killian sat beneath the shade of the tree. It was still withered, decayed, but she could sense life beneath their feet, its roots once more taking hold in the dead earth, stubbornly beginning to grow again. “I think it will be likely that Rumpelstiltskin demands I spend them above, with my mother perhaps, in an effort to punish you, without punish you.”_ _

__Killian’s fingers tightened over Aurora’s waist, and she turned fully into him, burying her nose into his cool neck._ _

__“He cannot hurt me, of course. A god is bound to his word, is he not?”_ _

__“So he is.”_ _

__He kissed her to distract her, mouth moving hotly over hers. Aurora laughed, at his obvious tactic, and then sighed as his hands slipped up her thighs, tangling in the filmy fabric of her gown. She was breathless by the time he allowed her air, and tugged her half into his lap. Her fingers were curled into his wild, tussled dark hair and she could not help but feel something very akin to prideful glee. He looked up at her, eyes heavy-lidded and beseeching, arched up into her as she dragged her hand down his chest and farther still._ _

__“Wife.” It was half a moan, half a curse._ _

___I will master my husband_ , Aurora thought with a preen. She laid her mouth to his feverish brow as he shuddered beneath her. “The mortals love their stories,” she murmured, with a fleeting, tender thought of the shepherd who had first kissed her beneath a willow tree. “What will they say of us, I wonder? Rumpelstiltskin controls Apollo, who controls the Oracles. Will they even know the truth of us?”_ _

__Killian was more concerned with the hollow of her throat, and rolling his tongue along the ridge of it. She felt the curve of his smile hot against her flesh. “They may tell the story however they like. Stories have always amused me, but the truth far less.”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. this was, at its core, a labor of love for the Sleeping Hook community. Never was there a more talented bunch of ladies, a group of ladies who never let me forget how long ago I told them I wrote this au for Aurora and Killian.
> 
> 2\. obviously the fruit that grew on the tree is the pomegranate, though if it invokes a little image of Adam, Eve, and the apple that's okay too
> 
> 3\. the "debt" Eros mentions Aurora owing him is in fact a reference to the myth of Cupid and Psyche, whose final trial for Venus is to go to the Underworld and collect a box of beauty from Persephone. Couldn't resist the addition of that, as its the author's second favorite myth after this one


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